


(i know) places we won't be found

by galacticbestbuds



Category: Chaos;Child (Visual Novel)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene, can be read as romantic or platonic, these kids deserve something normal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:40:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27217321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticbestbuds/pseuds/galacticbestbuds
Summary: If Hinae lets herself think for too long, she can still see everything — the Sumo Stickers, the pyrokinetic, that damn alley — and she feels it, too. Feels the flame singe her hair, her skin, feels the asphalt scratch against her arms and legs, feels the smoke fill her lungs. It makes her nauseous.“What about…” she says, suddenly overcome by her memories, “that night?”OR: Set during Their Resistance II, Takuru and Hinae find time to reflect on their powers.
Relationships: Miyashiro Takuru/Arimura Hinae
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	(i know) places we won't be found

The sky is a bleeding red, long after school ended for the day and everyone from the Newspaper Club gone home. At least, that’s what Hinae thinks before she enters the clubroom. Though she guesses it if had to be anyone, it would be him.

She hesitates.

Of course she does. Hinae rocks back and forth on her heels, and he hasn’t noticed her yet, so the option of walking away is there if she wants to. The door is only halfway open.

This _is_ his clubroom. Even if she doesn’t want to admit it, he calls the shots around here — president and all. She has her own clubroom to loiter around, but there’s something about _this_ clubroom that naturally draws her in, like the truth she’s searching for can somehow be found here. Besides, Hinae’s just as involved in this case as much as everyone else. She’s only taking advantage of the invite, really.

So, she plasters a smile onto her face, bright and cheery and as _Hinae_ as possible.

 _Which is the real you, Hina-chan?_ Serika’s question from earlier runs circles in her head.

“Ciao, senpai!”

No response. Takuru sits still, unfazed by her greeting. He’s faced away from the door, his hands twisting around the cap of a half-empty soda bottle. She clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth and steps forward.

“I can stay here, right?” Hinae asks, but it’s more of a statement than anything else because she’s already setting her bag down, halfway to hoisting herself up onto the table like she owns the place. She makes a big show of stretching out her arms and legs as she relaxes into her spot. It’s only then that he really notices her presence, tearing his eyes away from the map to gape at her.

“H-Hey! You can’t just—” Takuru presses his lips into a thin line, clearly annoyed at her manners, before sighing and shaking his head. “Yeah. Just for a bit.”

And just like that, he’s not looking at her anymore.

To say she’s disappointed means she expects something from him, which she doesn’t. So, she lets it go, for now.

Hinae follows his gaze back to the corkboard. The map is filled with gory pictures of crime scenes and incomprehensible post-it notes, thumbtacks and multi-colored string, everything pulled straight from a thriller movie. She remembers her amazement at its thoroughness when she first saw it, but now it only looks daunting, with them at the center of the mystery.

“You’re still here,” she says.

There’s a long pause before he speaks up. “So are you.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t want to go home yet.” Hinae brushes it off, swinging her legs back and forth until the tips of her shoes barely scrape against the floor. She waits for the ‘ _why’_ , preparing lists of excuses in her head, something about being a teenage girl with lots to do outside of home, and nothing about her aunt and her uncle and their lies.

When it doesn’t come, she probes, a little more curious now, “ _And_? What about you? I thought you already went home with Kurusu-senpai.”

Takuru grunts like he’s about to correct her, but he holds back. “I told her I was going to pick up some things from my RV before I went.”

He’s speaking the truth, but this place definitely isn’t his RV. There’s something more between those lines, and if Hinae _really_ wants to, she can dig a little deeper. And that’s the thing about her power — even if she wants to live in ignorance, she can’t. The truth gets to her one way or another. But truths aren’t always good either, and she knows that from experience.

So, Hinae doesn’t push when she doesn’t need to, tiptoeing around boundaries.

“I’ve been trying to get in contact with you _all_ weekend,” she says, if only to continue the conversation. “I thought about dropping by Aoba Clinic, but walking around has been…” Hinae cuts herself off, gesturing vaguely, not sure if she wants to breach that topic just yet **.** _Difficult_ **.** Walking around the city isn’t an easy option for her since the attack, and she’ll do anything else before suffering those consequences again.

This gets a reaction out of him. He breaks from his reverie, his eyes widening. “You’ve been looking for me?”

“Not because I care,” she says, a little unconvincingly. “I just wanted to know if you had any updates on the case. There’s just no other way to contact you. It’s not like you gave me your number or anything.”

“I lost my phone,” Takuru says, leaving it at that.

“Huh? So you’ve been going around without your phone? _Wow_ , I don’t know how you can do that! I mean, how do you talk to your friends? What if something happens to you?” An endless stream of questions comes barreling out of her mouth, and she leans forward, waiting for his response.

There is none.

She frowns, annoyed. At the very least, Takuru should acknowledge her effort in this conversation and say something back. He must really be clueless when it comes to treating girls correctly.

If it’s a game he wants to play, Hinae can play it better. There’s nothing she’s better at than talking, understanding what gets people to respond. It’s better than sitting in silence.

“So,” she drags out, “what is it? Did you want to talk? About the case, I mean. That’s the reason you’re here, right?”

“I just wanted to get my thoughts together.”

 _Truth._ Hinae can believe that. They did cover a lot of information during the meeting earlier, and it’s likely Takuru wants to run through everything one more time. It’s part of the reason she’s here, too, tired of pacing the hallway with too many thoughts in her head.

She runs her hands over the worn table, fingers trailing the mess of books and papers stacked on the tabletop. Even if she didn’t know about Kurusu’s accident, she can tell that she hasn’t been visiting lately because there’s no way the Student Council president would ever let things get _this_ messy, and—

Hinae pauses. Her hand stops atop a warm piece of paper, the print date in the corner reading just a few minutes before she walked in. Printouts about the recent arson cases happening around Shibuya, the same arson cases they talked about earlier today. The same ones they’ve almost fallen victim to.

Three days.

It’s been three days.

If Hinae lets herself think for too long, she can still see everything — the Sumo Stickers, the pyrokinetic, that damn alley — and she _feels_ it, too. Feels the flame singe her hair, her skin, feels the asphalt scratch against her arms and legs, feels the smoke fill her lungs. It makes her nauseous.

“What about…” she says, suddenly overcome by her memories, “that night?”

It’s silent. Takuru doesn’t even glance in her direction, not moving an inch.

“Miyashiro-senpai,” Hinae calls, waving a hand in front of his face, and if she sounds worried, she chalks it up to the possibility of losing her game **.** “Are you okay?”

“Mhmm,” he answers, distracted.

“Are you _sure?_ ”

“Mhmm.”

And, just to test the waters, she says, “And you and Itou-senpai are secretly lovers and this is your secret meeting spot, so you’re just waiting for me to leave?”

“Mhm—mmpfh?!”

“You weren’t listening to me,” she mutters. It’s only really a game when two people are playing. She kicks both her legs back and forth, but she only catches air.

He’s not that good at hiding his reactions, either, because Hinae notices the panic that crosses his face, the image of someone caught in the middle of an act. Takuru hastily clears his throat, still turned away from her. “Sorry.”

Hinae reads a lot of books. She’s good at putting two and two together when it’s as obvious as this, when characters don’t match their words to their actions.

Sure, she hasn’t known him for too long, and it’s not like they had many chances to sit down and talk to each other one-on-one like this. But Takuru is always _talking_ , always has questions to be answered and answers to be questioned, but he hasn’t given her anything to work with since she arrived. The Takuru she sees right now isn’t the same Takuru who was leading the Newspaper Club meeting earlier. The uneasiness is hard to ignore.

She studies him, puts her fingers up in a makeshift rectangle with Takuru at the center, a film director peering through a camera.

Hinae catches the way his eyes dart at her before fixing back onto the map, his fingers drumming against his Mountain View bottle like he’s _nervous_ about something, but what can he even be nervous about? It’s just Hinae.

Oh.

_It’s just Hinae._

Her fingers shake, and she settles her hands back down onto her lap before he notices.

It’s always been awkward between them — she remembers their paper folding during preparation for the School Festival when her curiosity got the best of her — but things should’ve changed by now, she thinks. After everything. But even earlier, when he pulled her from her classroom when class ended, he didn’t say much to her other than that he was taking her to the clubroom to discuss the cases. She carried most of the small talk, trying to catch up to his pace, bounding up the staircase two steps at a time and only stopping once they were around the others.

Maybe the peace they made with each other the night of the attack was a superficial peace after all, just like with everyone else.

That’s right. He still doesn’t trust her.

Hinae frowns.

“Oi, senpai.”

“What now?”

“You don’t like me, do you?”

He chokes, losing his grip on his Mountain View.

“That’s the reason you’re not even looking at me or answering my questions. You haven’t said my name _once_ since I walked in.”

“W-What? No, that’s—” _A lie._ Hinae narrows her eyes at him, and he gulps. “That’s… well…”

“It’s written all over your face, you know.” She sighs. “You’re easy to read, senpai.”

“That’s not true,” Takuru insists, though he grimaces when his voice cracks, “I-I’m really good at keeping my expressions under control.”

He busies himself by adjusting his glasses, his hand covering his face.

“See? Just like that,” she says, reaching over to move his hand out of the way so she can get a better look. The embarrassment is right there, but he swats her hand away, refusing to meet her eyes.

“W-What about it?”

“It’s not an insult,” Hinae says. “It’s a good thing, actually. It means I can talk to you comfortably… except for when you act like this.”

And he starts to have this look on his face, the look she’s becoming all too familiar with, like he’s weighing all the available choices in his head because all he does is think, dividing wrong from right and right from wrong. She wonders what side she stands on, from his perspective.

“We’re allies, aren’t we?” Hinae asks, and she can’t help the irritation building in her voice. “I thought we went over this. I’m not going to hu—”

“That’s not what I mean.” His expression darkens, no longer the timid Takuru she’s been talking to for the last half-hour. “And I told you this… that doesn’t mean I _trust_ you. At least, not yet. Listen, there hasn’t been enough time.”

They talked about this before, too, and her reaction then was different. She was okay with letting it go, but something about now, about the two of them together, alone, still with this uncrossable distance, bothers her.

“You don’t have to trust me _completely_ ,” she argues, wanting to see this through. “But you can _try_. Weren’t we just fighting for our lives a couple days ago?”

“Well, it’s not like we got off on the right start.”

His words stir her heart, heavy and hurt, conflicting feelings clashing over and over, forming something all too recognizable. Suddenly, she’s in that hotel room again, watching her closest friend die, and Miyashiro Takuru looking at her with fear in his eyes. Hinae closes her own eyes, gripping onto the edge of the table, trying to center herself. This is the clubroom, she reminds herself. A safer place.

She opens her eyes, swallows through a dry throat.

“Hmm, I see,” Hinae says, slowly, considering her options. “Then let’s do it.”

“Do… what?” Takuru asks, cautiously.

“Let’s get _on_ the right start.” Hinae bounces up in her seat, shaking the table a bit, and reaches her hand out in front of Takuru’s face.

“Wait—"

“Ciao! I’m Arimura Hinae and I’m—” she starts to repeat her introduction from earlier today but catches herself. It’s only half of the truth. And right now, she’s not really in the mood to be lying. There’s no one she really needs to hide from here, anyway, tucked away in a clubroom that seems so far away from the rest of the world. “And it’s nice to meet you.”

He sits there for a while, just stares at her hand. The corner of Takuru’s lip twitches up for a faint second, so quick she almost misses it, and Hinae tries to burn that image into the back of her eyelids. She got _Miyashiro Takuru_ to smile, and she feels herself grinning.

Then, he says, a little bluntly, “What? No ‘you’re going to be killed’ this time?”

She blinks.

Hinae withdraws her hand, lays it back on the table, redirects her attention somewhere else. She doesn’t look at him, doesn’t look down either, but she knows her hands are on the papers. She can trace the fire from memory.

“Jeez, that was…” She tries to laugh it off, though her nerves slip into her voice. The mood’s returning to what it was at the start, retracing the steps she’s tried so hard to move away from.

“Arimura,” Takuru says her name for the first time since she walked in. He’s looking right at her, now, and even though _this is what she wanted_ , there’s an uncomfortable feeling settling in her stomach, worse than all the Sumo Stickers in the world combined. Any trace of that smile is gone from his face. “Earlier, in the student council room when you said I would be killed. Was it because…?”

His question hangs in the air.

Takuru looks back at the corkboard. Her eyes run over the sticky note with his writing – “ _had special powers” –_ and she shivers involuntarily, folding in on herself. Maybe that was it all along. A silly thought that surfaced in her head back then, a thought she’s still thinking of right now, that if Takuru doesn’t get involved, she can save him. Live happily and ignorant, free from the constraints of his powers.

But they’re both too deep in this now, and she remembers the tortured look on his face when they met in that alleyway, his fingers twisted and desperate around hers as they ran.

He’s in a constant state of running away, even when he thinks he’s above everyone else. Even when he thinks he can be brave.

She knows this because she’s running, too. Since the earthquake, all she ever knows how to do is run.

Maybe it’s time to stop.

“We’re special.” There’s a sharpness to her voice, and his face twists up like he hates the word. But she keeps talking anyway because it’s the first time in a while she’s been able to freely talk about this with someone other than Kunosato and Detective Shinjo. With someone who can understand. “We’re special, and the world doesn’t like us because we’re us."

She picks up one of the articles, turns it over in her hands. It's light, discounting the heaviness of its contents. “It’s not because we’re bad people, or that we’re dangerous. They don’t like us because we’re different and that makes us less human than they are.”

It’s the same with Kunosato, and even Detective Shinjo has his lapses, and Hinae notices whether she’s trying or not. She thinks that’s the worst part, having these people on their side even when they’re only halfway there for her.

“We ran into each other that night because of the Sumo Stickers, right? Kunosato-san told me that they’re designed to make Gigalomaniacs react and go all dizzy and nauseous so they can find us. But what makes me sick the most is that they remind me of who I am…” And after a moment, she adds, in a quiet voice, “Who we are.”

“Arimura…”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it,” she says. “What it means to have our powers. What it means to be a psychic in this world.”

Takuru winces at this, guilt written on his face.

At his silence, she continues, “I knew you were like me when we first met. The door was locked, and no one should’ve been able to open the door so easily without a key. Unless… unless they had powers like mine. And looking into this sort of thing was exactly what would expose you to them. So, that’s why—”

“—you tried to warn me?”

She looks at Kakita, at his _body_ , the picture of him right before his death. _Revolving Dead_. A crude information sheet about the case is tacked next to the picture. She’s not as internet-savvy as Takuru or Kunosato, but she’s done her fair share of searching around when she was still helping Kakita that she knows how everyone acts online. They laugh and joke and spin words into weird theories like they’re just watching some TV show about a fictional story. Her gaze follows the multi-colored thread across the board, looking at the others: Ootami, Takayanagi, Watabe. All these people, all these other psychics. That’s all they are to everyone else, another death no one cares about.

Hinae refuses to die like that.

“Heheh, it was a bit dramatic, wasn’t it?” She laughs, tugging at the loose strands of one of her twin tails. “That’s more or less the idea. But, jeez, you got yourself involved anyway.” Hinae clicks her tongue, sighing. “What a waste.”

“You could’ve explained things better,” he mutters.

“Yeah, yeah,” Hinae dismisses. “Anyway, what’s next for us is that we need to start trusting each other.”

“…Us?”

“Eh?” She lets out an exaggerated gasp, pulling back as much as she can without falling off the table, pretending to come down with the chills. “I don’t know what’s going through your head, Miyashiro-senpai, but not like _that_!”

“Huh?” he says, a blank look on his face. “W-Wait, that’s not—”

Hinae laughs again, soundly. It’s not the fake one she performs around the girls she hangs out with. More genuine, like she’s one step closer to escaping the mask she spent the last six years carefully carving. Takuru glares at her, but there’s no real animosity behind it, and she has to bite down on her lip to control her laughter.

“But you understand now, right?” Hinae asks, and when Takuru doesn’t shake his head, she smiles, “Alright, consider us restarted.”

She lets out a breath, a rush of relief coursing through her body. She’s ready to finish this conversation, the tone a lot more serious than she’s used to having, but Takuru clears his throat, opening his mouth.

“Before that,” he says, thoughtfully, “If you want me to trust you, I need to know something.”

“Hmm?”

“Which Arimura is this?” Takuru asks. “The cheerful one? The serious one?”

_Which is the real you, Hina-chan?_

Hinae had her family and then she lost them. Hinae had her brother and then she lost him.

The corkboard stares at her, tauntingly. She stares back, searching for an answer in Kakita’s picture.

She lost him, too.

But Kakita was always doing bigger and better things than her, always just like her brother, and even though that’s what Takuru _wants_ to do, he’s just a high school student. They’re _both_ just high school students, kids caught up in something much bigger than themselves. Hinae wonders if she can take comfort in that.

When they first met, he opened the door into an inescapable truth. And now, here she is, opening that same door.

“The truthful one,” she decides, finally. Hinae’s not the same person she was before the earthquake. She doesn’t think she can ever return to that bright-eyed child, an Arimura Hinae buried beneath the rubble. Or maybe that Hinae died long before that, a ghost at her family’s dinner table, left behind on the bus on the way back home. But she can choose who she is, now.

He’s silent for a moment, then nods. “Okay.”

Hinae only notices that he’s reaching for her hand when it _happens_ , his fingers closing around hers on the tabletop, and she can feel him shaking.

“Miyashiro Takuru.” His ears are bright red, and he’s stuttering like he’s never spoken to her before. “Er—my name. T-That’s my name.”

He’s introducing himself to her.

It’s awkward and clunky and a part of her wonders how Takuru even made friends like Serika and Itou like this, especially now that he’s _holding_ her hand instead of just shaking it, but she freezes in place despite it all.

Hinae doesn’t look at him, only stares at their interlocked hands. His skin is soft.

This is probably his first time holding a girl’s hand, Hinae thinks instead. If this were any other time, maybe she would crack a joke or two. Tease him a bit. Lighten the atmosphere. But she knows if she says anything about it, he’ll yelp and take his hand back, and for some reason, she really doesn’t want him to do that. She wants his hand on hers, the warmth consuming her body, replacing the feeling of the fire, of the chaos, of their whole situation with something else. Something exciting.

Hinae focuses on tucking a piece of hair that fell loose from her twin tails away from her face, trying to ignore the way her heart is beating out of her chest.

“We’ll get through this,” Takuru says, finally, and she can tell he spent an absurd amount of time trying different phrases in his head to be hopeful without _lying,_ and it brings a smile to her face. “You don’t have to do this alone anymore. Now, you have Onoe, Itou, Kazuki, Kurusu…”

And without thinking, Hinae says, “—And I have you.” She tilts her head. “Allies, right?”

“Uh, er—yeah.”

For a split second, she sees it materialize in the corner of her eye, something awakening in the dead-spots of her vision. A blurry sword in error-state, still trapped in the Dirac sea. And then time stops. She feels the wind blowing from the open window, but the previously annoying strand of hair stays still behind her ear. Takuru’s eyes are on her, concentrated. She blinks and it’s gone, her hair loose in the wind again, like it never happened.

To anyone else, it never did.

But that’s what makes them different, what makes them special, a moment uniquely theirs.

Takuru quickly turns away from her, clearing his throat. He’s gone all red, and Hinae knows she probably looks the same, feeling heat rush through her body. Her hand tingles beneath his touch.

“Wow, are you _blushing_?” Hinae says, pointing it out before he notices the way her cheeks are flushed. “You’re more of a pervert than I thought, Miyashiro-senpai.”

“N-No, I’m not!” Takuru tries to backtrack, his hand lifting from hers for a second, and her breath catches in her throat before she reaches and grabs it right back. She’s still laughing at him, at how the redness of his face reaches down to his neck, but the warmth between their hands is a combined heat from the both of them. After a while, he starts to laugh, too.

She deserves something normal, she thinks, the feeling of holding hands with a boy while they’re both trying to figure things out. No Di-Swords or pyromaniacs or unsettling murders. Just them, just this.

“But it’s true, right?” Hinae says. “We’re both in this together, whether we like it or not.”

“So there’s nothing to worry about,” Takuru finishes, avoiding her eyes for a different reason than before.

And she likes it.

He’s in her shoes, and she’s in his, and for now, they can be lost together.

“Yeah.” It’s dark outside now, and she can just barely make out the outline of the stars that dust the night sky. Hinae takes one last look out the window, out the fifth floor, out to the rebuilt Shibuya. “I hope so.”

**Author's Note:**

> it’s been months since i’ve read chaos;child and i couldn’t stop thinking about the potential between these two. i latched onto them immediately as hinae was introduced and i just needed to get something about them into the world. for even a small portion of the VN, i want to believe that they found solace in being the only two (revealed) psychics at the time and realized they weren’t alone because they had each other.
> 
> i wasn’t sure whether to post this because the chaos; fandom is small as it is and there’s not many works here, but i hope that maybe someone out there who loves takuhina as much as i do will find this and it’ll make their day a little brighter :~) thank you for reading!


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